Morocco’s Hirak protests are the latest bout in the tug-of-war between the Makhzen (Moroccan regime) and the victims of hogra. The late Mouhcine Fikri, the political prisoner Nasser Zefzafi, and Nawal Ben Aissa have emerged as the emblematic figures of this movement. Al Hirak al Chaabi, or the Popular Movement, is ... Read More »

Introduction
For the last several months, Moroccan politics has been dominated by the results of the October 2016 parliamentary elections, the subsequent blocage in the Islamist Justice and Development Party(PJD) creating a governing coalition, and the announcement of a new government. Pro-state media ... Read More »

Henri Lauzière, The Making of Salafism: Islamic Reform in the Twentieth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Henri Lauzière (HL): I wrote the book in an attempt to solve a nagging problem in Islamic intellectual history. For the last three decades or so, ... Read More »

The Story of the Fishmonger
A few weeks ago, the media carried the tragic story of a Moroccan fishmonger named Mouhcine Fikri, aged thirty-one, from the northern coastal town of al-Hoceima. Fikri was crushed to death by a rubbish compactor as he tried to retrieve a bundle of swordfish that had been callously tossed ... Read More »

All eyes are on Marrakesh where the 22nd Conference of the Parties on climate change takes place (COP22). The city has been cleaned up, Skype and Whatsapp are back online and the media pull out all the stops to put across a message of an environmentally friendly and politically moderate Morocco. COP22 has to become ... Read More »

In August 2015, Maati Monjib was returning home to Morocco from his summer vacation. But before he could clear customs and leave the airport to return to his home in Rabat, Moroccan police apprehended and detained him, notifying him that he faced the charge of “endangering state security.” Until legal matters were ... Read More »

In Western Sahara, any news item is also a potential item of propaganda. Words, like individuals, have ideological mass. Thus former United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s use of the word “occupation” in a speech following his March 2016 visit to the Sahrawi refugee camps near Tindouf, Algeria, was the subject ... Read More »

The Third Book: An Inclination to Sunset
By Salah Boussrif
1. My march will be an inclination
to sunset
[Thus Spoke Zarathustra]
· When fullness reaches perfection, it appears empty
[The Book of Tao]
The sea was nothing but
a lamp suspended in the air
and language
before ... Read More »

In April this year, a story appeared on an Algerian football website, Le Competiteur, noting that the country’s national football team was planning a friendly match against Western Sahara. The question for the article was how Algeria’s regional rival Morocco would respond.
Following incomplete decolonization by ... Read More »

Many factors motivated my decision to translate this small selection of poems into English. First of all, my growing awareness of the dearth of Maghrebi literary production in English prompted me to think more critically about translation and its effects on the reception of this literature in foreign academic ... Read More »

Adopted on 29 April 2016, the Security Council's Resolution 2285 on the Western Sahara is the closest thing to an ultimatum: the kingdom has four months to authorize the return of the civilian staff-members of the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara, known as MINURSO. The decision to expel ... Read More »

Ouarzazate is a beautiful town in south-central Morocco, well worth visiting. It is an important holiday destination and has been nicknamed the "door of the desert." It is also known as a famed location for international filmmaking, where films such as Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The ... Read More »

Mona Harb and Sami Atallah, editors, Local Governments and Public Goods: Assessing Decentralization in the Arab World. Beirut: LCPS-OSF, 2015.
Jadaliyya (J): What made you put together this book?
Mona Harb and Sami Atallah (MH and SA): We wanted to write this book since we first met at a conference on ... Read More »

The Moroccan electoral race began in September with the local and regional elections, which culminated on Tuesday 13 October with the election of the President of the Chamber of Councillors, the Upper House of Parliament. [1] The 120 elected representatives (217 prior to the constitutional reform of 2011) have ... Read More »

Moroccans took to the polls on 4 September to vote in the first local elections since 2009. A total of about one hundred forty thousand candidates competed for around thirty-two thousand seats. These local elections were the first to take place after the new constitution in 2011, which the monarch effectively used as ... Read More »

[The following is the final part of "The Moroccan Non-Exception" Jadaliyya roundtable. Read the introduction here. Read the first part of this installment here.]
The interaction of memory and forgetting in the state's construction of the history of the 1950s in Morocco takes on a pervasive form at ... Read More »

[The following is the first part in the final installment of "The Moroccan Non-Exception" Jadaliyya roundtable. Read the introduction here.]
The year is 1958. Morocco has entered its second year of independence from France. Sultan Mohammed V is aging and Crown Prince Hassan II, Commander of the Royal Armed ... Read More »

About Turkey Page

Jadaliyya’s Turkey Page features exclusive and in-depth coverage by contributors on the ground in Turkey as well as outside observers, from a wide range of perspectives. We aim to enrich the coverage of Turkey throughout the English-language media, to generate new critical conversations, and to translate work being published in Turkish for an English-language audience. We welcome submissions in both English and Turkish. If you wish to contribute to this page, send your material to Turkey@Jadaliyya.com or click below: